1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a technique of printing a captured image including a human.
2. Related Art
With a progress in digital technologies, an image has become possible to be simply treated in a form of image data. For example, image data can be simply generated by capturing an image using a digital camera. By providing the image data to a printing apparatus, the image can be easily printed in a full color. In addition, image data can be generated by reading the image by the use of a scanner, or using various application programs executed on a computer. Furthermore, printing technologies and image processing technologies have been improving every year. Accordingly, it has become possible to print the image with an image quality by no means inferior to a color picture printed from a film conventionally used even when the image is printed from the image data.
In general, an observer of the image tends to closely observe human faces even when the faces are just a part of the image. Therefore, when the faces are not properly presented, it gives an impression that the quality of the entire image is inferior.
Considering such a matter, Japanese Patent Publication No. 2004-240829A (JP-A-2004-240829) proposes a technique of automatically detecting the part including human faces in the image and correcting the image data to make the facial part to have an appropriate brightness. In addition, Japanese Patent Publication No. 2005-148915A (JP-A-2005-148915) proposes a technique of correcting the image data to print the facial part in a preferable skin color.
However, it is not always preferable to detect only human faces in the image with high accuracy. Therefore, there may be a problem in that the proposed techniques erroneously detect the parts other than faces and perform an inappropriate correction, thereby resulting in an unnatural image. In order to prevent such a problem, when criterion for determining whether it is the face become strict, the face may not be detected as the face and may not be corrected. Particularly, in the image includes a plurality of humans, the corrected faces and the non-corrected faces may be mixed, thereby resulting in the unnatural image.